Jay Gard Germany, b. 1984

Jay Gard was born in 1984 in Halle an der Saale, Germany, and grew up in Chemnitz in the waning years of the German Democratic Republic. Both of his parents worked as designers, and this early immersion in a world where objects and built form carried explicit social and ideological meaning left a lasting imprint on his thinking. He began his studies in painting at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle under Professor Thomas Rug from 2004 to 2006, before transferring to the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), where he studied in the sculpture class of Professor Florian Slotawa in 2008. That same year he enrolled at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (HGB), studying in the Class for Installation and Space under Professor Joachim Blank, where he completed his diploma in 2011. Between 2006 and 2008, Gard worked as an assistant in the studio of the American artist Tom Sachs in New York, and subsequently in the studio of Thomas Demand in Berlin, an experience that profoundly sharpened his understanding of material, fabrication, and the conceptual weight of objects. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2012, and is co-curator of the Berlin project space BcmA.

Gard understands sculpture as a form of communication between people: a physical language in which objects are never neutral. When humans shape matter, they inscribe intention, value, and memory into it. His practice is grounded in the history of ornament and the cultural logic of making, asking how form becomes charged with identity and how designed objects bind us to the world and to each other. Early works were marked by clear geometric structures and an interest in color theory, including his analytical method of extracting color palettes from historic and contemporary paintings and arranging them in color wheels of varying scales. More recent sculptures have shifted toward a vocabulary of organic form, rhythm, and surface, in which the act of shaping itself becomes the subject. Works such as The Beginning of Shaping (2023) and the duo exhibition Ornament als Versprechen (2024, with Jan Tichy) exemplify this evolution, as does his solo presentation Fell und Stahl (2026, with Anna Haifisch) at Kunsthaus Potsdam.

Gard's institutional exhibition history is substantial. His first solo museum exhibition, Gabriele (2019), was presented at the Museum Gunzenhauser in Chemnitz as part of the series Young Contemporary Art from Saxony, with works made in direct response to the collection of Dr. Alfred Gunzenhauser. Further solo and institutional presentations include We Built This City at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2020); Circles at GRIMMWELT, Kassel (2021); Curves at Warte für Kunst, Kassel (2021); It's the Frame Not the Painting at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center, Vilnius, Lithuania (2017); and Colors at Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen (2018). Group exhibitions have taken him to the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau (2019), the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt in Berlin (2020), the Kunstverein Montez in Frankfurt (2021), the Pilane Heritage Museum in Sweden (2025, alongside Ugo Rondinone), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (2015), among many others. In 2024 he participated in Chemnitz 2025, the European Capital of Culture program. His published monographs include Jay Gard: Form und Farbe (Lubok Verlag, 2019) and Unikat XVII (Art Magazin, 2023).

Gard has received an Art Grant from the Kunstfonds Foundation Bonn (2019), an exhibition grant for Gabriele from the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen (2019), an exhibition grant for It's the Frame Not the Painting from the Goethe-Institut Lithuania (2017), an Artist in Residence at the Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2016), the Bauhaus 100-year Jubilee Residency in Dessau (2019), and residencies at the CCA Andratx in Mallorca in both 2023 and 2026.

Jay Gard is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. The gallery has presented his work in multiple formats, including the solo exhibition The Beginning of Shaping at 69salon by KORNFELD (2023), the duo exhibition Ornament als Versprechen with Jan Tichy at KORNFELD Galerie (2024), and the group exhibitions Body Language (2023) and Hofskulptur (2025). KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has also presented Gard's work at Art Cologne (2025) and Art Karlsruhe (2025 and 2026).

With each new body of work, Jay Gard deepens a practice that is as philosophically grounded as it is materially immediate, one in which the act of shaping remains the most direct way of asking what it means to be human in a built world.